BELLOWS FALLS — In a 5-to-4 vote on Tuesday night, the Rockingham Free Public Library Board of Trustees decided to uphold its Sept. 18 vote to terminate Library Director Célina Houlné.
The decision came following a lengthy two-day hearing where Houlné was given an opportunity to present her response to an evaluation and the corrective-action plan (CAP) that found her job performance deficient.
After nearly 2½ hours of deliberation, no trustees who had originally voted to terminate the library director were convinced to reverse their Sept. 18 decision.
Public comment followed the board vote, and at least eight people voiced their disappointment in the board.
Joel Love, husband of Library Trustees Chair Jan Mitchell-Love, commended the board members on their deep research and hard work in coming to the decision.
Houlné said afterwards that she was “sad,” but said that she had more concern for the library staff and volunteers who were “under a lot of stress right now with the move back into the library.”
She said she would be meeting with her lawyer next to decide what to do. After the original filing, she and her attorney, Richard Bowen, promised to take legal action, against the Board of Trustees and/or individual members.
Mitchell-Love said the next step will be to hire a new library director but had no further information on when that process would begin.
Houlné had been granted the hearing as an opportunity to address both the CAP delivered in May by the Personnel Committee to Houlné, and the performance evaluations that became the justification for the library director's dismissal.
Oct. 17 hearing
The hearing, which began Oct. 10 and was continued to Oct. 17, contained nearly eight hours of testimony. Bowen led staff, volunteers, and former and current trustees through relevant evaluations, and examined the CAP process, asking them to testify about what they found and explain how they came to their conclusions.
In the Oct. 17 hearing, Bowen charged that some of Houlné's shortcomings were determined to be failures of the board of trustees to act effectively in their own responsibilities.
He also presented a case for the evaluation process not taking into account staff evaluations, which most of the board had not been given an opportunity to see prior to their evaluations.
Bowen also pointed out through witness testimony that the concurrent renovation project kept the library director busy negotiating her normal duties with the added burden of the ongoing renovation, and that previous boards had made a decision to help relieve Houlné of some of her duties.
Then in May, the personnel CAP committee added to Houlné's burdened plate with a directive to satisfy a weekly task list, and met weekly with her. Houlné said the committee never told her they were dissatisfied with what she brought to them.
Trustee Ray Massucco and Carolyn Frisa testified the board never saw the individual evaluations of other trustees, nor did they see the evaluations of the staff before the board voted on Houlné's termination on Sept. 18.
Laura Senes, who served on the personnel committee and helped with tallying numerical values from the trustees' evaluations, was shown an evaluation she had never seen before that was left mostly blank. She said she had not seen that and didn't know what it was.
Bowen noted that the document was one that Rockingham Town Attorney Steven Ankuda submitted to him as one of the evaluations that the personnel committee used to create the collation.
“But you've never seen this before?” he asked. Senes said she had not.
Frisa testified that the 2013 evaluation said that Houlné had failed to meet the previous year's goals. Bowen read the 2012 evaluation aloud, noting it was highly supportive and complimentary of Houlné's goal completions. He asked if she had read that part of the 2012 evaluation.
She said she had not.
That same evaluation also noted that the ongoing library renovations required a lot of extra work for the library director that Houlné managed to balance, commending her for that.
Former trustee Susan Bourne and Massucco were both on the board at the time Houlné was hired.
Bourne said, from her perspective, if she had it to do again “right now, I would hire her again, and not fire her.”
Massucco told Bowen that he “never saw anything” to support Houlné's firing.
“I don't know what they were basing it on,” Massucco said, describing the personnel committee as “a juggernaut.”
“They were hell bent to get rid of Célina one way or another,” he said. “This thing was like a freight train.”
Massucco testified that he had served on the Board of Trustees for 17 years, several as chair, and that he was part of the hiring committee in 2008 who recruited Houlné.
“She was head and shoulders above the previous two [directors],” Massucco said.
When Trustee Hope Brissette, also on the personnel committee, took the seat, Bowen asked her about an evaluation that had only three of the nine questions marked.
When Brissette said maybe the trustee “had a job and was not around or was new,” as the reason why the evaluation was left two-thirds blank, Bowen asked, “In a situation where a trustee can't answer a simple question about the library they are a trustee of, do you think something is wrong in this process?”
Moving on and noting that several questions were about the director's work relationship with staff, Bowen asked if Brissette had seen the staff evaluations, noting that in large part they were overwhelmingly supportive of Houlné.
Brissette said she had, but that her evaluation was from her point of view.
“So you can't take into account evaluations from staff?” Bowen asked.
“I'm a person,” she replied.
Her daughter, Paige Pietrzak, also on the personnel committee, agreed.
“It's mine. It's my personal evaluation.”
Mitchell-Love then took the chair and testified for the last hour of Houlné's hearing.
At one point, Bowen questioned the chair about one of the supporting documents of the CAP, the minutes from a June 14, 2012 board meeting, which reflected the board's overwhelmingly positive vote to pass a policy change. He noted that the document was included as a reason for Houlné's probationary status.
Mitchell-Love responded by calling into question the authenticity of the minutes, saying Houlné told the board it was just “housekeeping.” The board president said, however, that “there were a great many changes” in the personnel policy that the board did not approve.
Bowen countered, “So the dysfunction of the board and its failure to keep minutes and [record of] votes, basically leads to a decision they made and can't confirm, and [Houlné] is going to be blamed in the CAP process?”
Mitchell-Love replied that Bowen was editorializing and denied that was what she said. Bowen replied that the record would reflect what she said.
Houlné responds
After nearly four hours of testimony, the second night of the hearing came to a close, and Houlné responded to close the hearing.
Responding to Trustee Deborah Wright's assertion from the first session that Houlné improperly gave herself a raise [“Process of evaluation,” News, Oct. 16], Houlné said, “There is no written policy and it has never been the practice, at least since I was hired in July 2008, to require that any staff person, either the director or anyone else, must actually request a cost of living increase when it has been built into the budget.
“As director, I have always implemented the budgeted increases for the rest of the staff as the budget allows, and there was never any expectation expressed by the board that I had to request my own increase. That 'requirement' exists entirely in Ms. Wright's imagination.”
She addressed the complaint about the personnel policy issue, noting that she “was following the historical and current practice, and my own job description, which indicates that the director is supposed to bring proposed changes to the board for discussion.”
“As written in the minutes of the Jan. 9, 2012 meeting, the board discussed the proposed language changes to the personnel policy, and approved these changes unanimously,” Houlné said. “The board had the authority and discretion to send the proposed changes back to the policy committee for further review if they had felt any discomfort about approving them at that time; however, they chose not do that, but rather to approve them wholeheartedly.”
The former director also addressed the complaint about “a pervasive dialogue of insubordination through every form of communication,” a charge that she described as “completely false.”
“This so-called 'dialogue of insubordination,' as alleged by Ms. Wright, was in truth, my efforts to conscientiously and vigorously fulfill my 'duty of care,' to ensure the best interests of the library were served, and to prevent actions that were unethical, illegal, against library policies, and counter to the best interests of the library,” Houlné said.
In the Oct. 10 meeting, she said she had refused to comply with an order from the CAP committee “that all staff record every request for information made by a member of the public, including the person's name, and that the CAP committee be informed of every request within 24 hours” because it violated state law and the library's own policies.
“I put my own personal interests aside, even knowing that challenging certain board members about their actions would put me at odds with them and risk their hostility toward me, in order to do what I knew was the right thing to do,” she said.
“I risked being called 'insubordinate' for having these different views,” Houlné said. “Despite this, I felt it was very important to speak out, as the issues had major repercussions on the library and its services.”